During the next four years, our Spanish member Fundación Global Nature (FGN) will implement the LIFE Wetlands4Climate project, whose objective is to demonstrate that the proper management, restoration and conservation of wetlands, in addition to conserving biodiversity, will be a benefit in mitigating climate change.
Last November, FGN presented Wetlands4Climate project during Wetlands International Europe’s General Members Meeting.
This recently approved LIFE project, will validate a methodology to quantify Green Gas House exchanges and will serve the climate policy objectives of Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry, generating data on carbon sequestration in wetlands that will serve, among others, to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as management guidelines that will increase their management as sinks. This project aims to offer developments and tools to be implemented, such as natural solutions in the management of wetlands that also include a climate perspective.
By developing management measures for conservation in 10 pilot wetlands, distributed throughout the Iberian Peninsula, an experimental protocol will be designed to assess in detail the characteristics and initial conditions of each of these wetlands in order to define the best management actions, including soil, water, vegetation management actions and those that potentially can have a greater effect on the carbon cycle and, consequently, on the capacity of wetlands to sequester carbon will be chosen.
This project opens the door for the Mediterranean, coastal or inland wetlands to behave as carbon sinks through specific management measures aligned with conservation interests, and proposes mechanisms for private initiative to join voluntarily multiplying the conservation and climate benefits.
Wetlands International Europe will support efforts to transfer and replicate results and will join forces with FGN to improve the policies and decisions that affect our freshwater ecosystems, specially wetlands.
For more information, visit FGN’s website.
Header image @ Andrew Kerr